course for the pleasure of readers in
the Underground Railway, I fear he will often have to forget Mr. Pater.
It may not be literature, the writing of _causeries_, of Roundabout
Papers, of rambling articles "on a broomstick," and yet again, it _may_
be literature! "Parallel, allusion, the allusive way generally, the
flowers in the garden"--Mr. Pater charges heavily against these. The
true artist "knows the narcotic force of these upon the negligent
intelligence to which any _diversion_, literally, is welcome, any vagrant
intruder, because one can go wandering away with it from the immediate
subject . . . In truth all art does but consist in the removal of
surplusage, from the last finish of the gem engraver blowing away the
last particle of invisible dust, back to the earliest divination of the
finished work to be lying somewhere, according to Michel Angelo's fancy,
in the rough-hewn block of stone."

Excellent, but does this apply to every kind of literary art? What would
become of Montaigne if you blew away his allusions, and drove him out of
"the allusive way," where he gathers and binds so many flowers from all
the gardens and all the rose-hung lanes of literature? Montaigne sets
forth to write an Essay on Coaches. He begins with a few remarks on
seasickness in the common pig; some notes on the Pont Neuf at Paris
follow, and a theory of why tyrants are detested by men whom they have
obliged; a glance at Coaches is then given, next a study of Montezuma's
gardens, presently a brief account of the Spanish cruelties in Mexico and
Peru, last--_retombons a nos coches_--he tells a tale of the Inca, and
the devotion of his Guard: _Another for Hector_!

The allusive style has its proper place, like another, if it is used by
the right man, and the concentrated and structural style has also its
higher province. It would not do to employ either style in the wrong
place. In a rambling discursive essay, for example, a mere straying
after the bird in the branches, or the thorn in the way, he might not
take the safest road who imitated Mr. Pater's style in what follows:

"In this way, according to the well-known saying, 'The style is the man,'
complex or simple, in his individuality, his plenary sense of what he
really has to say, his sense of the world: all cautions regarding style
arising out of so many natural scruples as to the medium through which
alone he can expose that inward sense of things, the purity of this
med